Saturday’s unexpected death of real estate exec Vance Miller brought to mind events of 30 years ago when the Dallas Cowboys very nearly had different ownership. Had the ball taken a slightly different bounce, the Cowboys might never been acquired by Jerry Jones.

Back in 1983, team founder Clint Murchison Jr. was battling a motor-neuron illness akin to Lou Gehrig’s Disease when he asked long-time Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm to find a buyer for the team who would maintain continuity. Under the Murchison-Schramm-Tom Landry triumvirate, the Cowboys had become the gold standard of the NFL.

Schramm approached oil and banking exec H.R. “Bum” Bright who didn’t want to tie up the necessary cash it would take to buy a majority interest in the team.

The frontrunners were W.O. Bankston, the millionaire businessman/car dealer and developer Vance Miller, head of his family’s venerable Henry S. Miller real estate company. They had partnered to make a run at purchasing their hometown NFL team.

The two men were long-time fans of the Cowboys who had once purchased 5,000 remaining tickets to a playoff game (along with clothier Lester Melnick) so a TV blackout would be lifted and Bankston’s daughter, who had multiple sclerosis, could watch it on TV.

But Schramm was not enamored with the idea of the two high-profile owners.

“They let everybody know their desires to buy the team,” Schramm told his biographer Bob St. John. “I don’t know if they felt by doing this they might add some pressure to sell to them or what. But there were a number of stories written and interviews done with them.”

No one knows what was said between Schramm and the team founder at Murchison’s 25-acre Forest Lane estate. But what is clear is that Schramm steered the team away from Bankston and Miller.

Instead, he contacted NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle to get permission for a limited partnership to buy the team. With a green light from Rozelle, Schramm went back to Bright.

Putting up 17 percent of the money for the purchase, Bright led an 11-person limited partnership that bought the team on March 19, 1984. The tumultuous five-year ownership of the Bright group mirrored the economy in Texas as the early ’80s boom crashed into a late ’80s bust. The Cowboys went 3-13 and Bright became openly critical of Coach Landry.

As Bright’s banking investments took a beating, he put the For Sale sign on America’s Team and Jerry Jones grabbed the franchise in 1989.

In the early ’90s, I asked Miller what would have happened had Schramm not been sour on a Bankston-Miller ownership.

According to Miller, “We’d still own the team and Tom Landry would still be coach.”